Abstract
Stimulated by the uses-and-gratification approach, this study examined the joint relation of several consumer characteristics to news interest. In total, 1,546 German-speaking participants rated their interest in 15 major news categories and several personal characteristics, including gender, age, the Big Five personality traits, self-esteem, as well as general positive and negative affect. Regression analyses examined the amount of interindividual variance in news interest that can be explained by this set of consumer characteristics. Overall, the amount of explained variance differed remarkably across news categories, ranging from 4% for entertainment-related news to 25% for news about technology. The most powerful explaining variables were participants’ gender, age, openness to experiences, and their amount of general positive affect. The results suggest that news interest should be defined and operationalized as a concept with multiple facets covering a huge range of content. Also, the results are important for media producers and journalists with respect to the conflict between increased need gratification of consumers and information filtering via personalized news content.
Highlights
News consumption plays an important role in our daily life as news provides information about events often being not directly accessible to us
We examined in an exploratory fashion: Research Question 2 (RQ2): How are general positive and negative affect related to consumers’ news interests?
The joint relation of the set of consumer characteristics to news interest was analyzed by a multiple regression analysis for each of the 15 news categories
Summary
News consumption plays an important role in our daily life as news provides information about events often being not directly accessible to us. Due to the increasing supply of news content, individual preferences and interests play a key role when it comes to news selection (Prior, 2005). Most previous studies focused on the link between a specific information interest and a single consumer characteristic, such as political orientation (Garrett, 2009), consumers’ mood state (Biswas et al, 1994), as well as gender and self-esteem (Knobloch-Westerwick et al, 2006). Only few studies investigated the joint relation of several consumer characteristics to interest in specific media content. Kraaykamp and Van Eijck (2005) conducted a large-scale study in which they examined the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and Dutch participants’ interest in different types of book content, cultural offers, and television preferences
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